Editing Homophone (section)

==Wordplay and games==
Homophones are often used to create [[pun]]s and to deceive the reader (as in [[crossword|crossword puzzles]]) or to suggest multiple meanings. The last usage is common in [[poetry]] and creative [[literature]]. An example of this is seen in [[Dylan Thomas]]'s radio play ''Under Milk Wood'': "The shops in mourning" where ''mourning'' can be heard as ''mourning'' or ''morning''. Another vivid example is [[Thomas Hood]]'s use of ''birth'' and ''berth'' as well as ''told'' and ''toll'd'' (tolled) in his poem "Faithless Sally Brown":

: His death, which happen'd in his ''berth'',
: At forty-odd befell:
: They went and ''told'' the sexton, and
: The sexton ''toll'd'' the bell.

In some [[Accent (sociolinguistics)|accents]], various sounds have [[phonemic differentiation|merged]] in that they are no longer distinctive, and thus words that differ only by those sounds in an accent that maintains the distinction (a [[minimal pair]]) are homophonous in the accent with the merger. Some examples from [[English language|English]] are:

* ''pin'' and ''pen'' in many [[Southern American English|southern American accents]] 
* ''by'' and ''buy'' 
* ''merry'', ''marry'', and ''Mary'' in most American accents 
* The pairs ''do'' and ''due'' as well as ''forward'' and ''foreword'' are homophonous in most American accents but not in most English accents 
* The pairs ''talk'' and ''torque'' as well as ''court'' and ''caught'' are distinguished in [[rhotic and non-rhotic accents|rhotic]] accents, such as [[Scottish English]], and most dialects of American English, but are homophones in some [[rhotic and non-rhotic accents|non-rhotic]] accents, such as British [[Received Pronunciation]] 

Wordplay is particularly common in English because the multiplicity of linguistic influences offers considerable complication in spelling and meaning and pronunciation compared with other languages.

[[Malapropism]]s, which often create a similar comic effect, are usually near-homophones. See also [[Eggcorn]].

===Same-sounding phrases===
During the 1980s, an attempt was made to promote a distinctive term for same-sounding multiple words or phrases, by referring to them as "oronyms",{{efn|
The name ''oronym'' was first proposed and advocated by [[Gyles Brandreth]] in his book ''The Joy of Lex'' (1980), and such use was also accepted in the [[BBC]] programme ''Never Mind the Full Stops'', which featured Brandreth as a guest.
}}
but since the term [[Toponymy#Toponymic typology|oronym]] was already well established in [[linguistics]] as an [[Onomastics|onomastic]] designation for a class of [[Toponymy|toponymic]] features (names of mountains, hills, etc.),{{sfn|Room|1996|p=75}} the alternative use of the same term was not well-accepted in scholarly literature.{{sfn|Stewart|2015|p=91, 237}}